A California-based correspondent shared the following vignette to a private email list early this morning. An aside — had dinner with a Stanford biz prof teaching entrepreneurship. His 15 Chinese students were at the table too (big table). A few spoke English. One is international marketing head for China Nuclear Power Engineering Company — largest…
I’ve been pondering the misadventures of the Akademik Shokalskiy for several days, thinking about the difference in result between an excursion planned on the cheap by people who depend on things going smoothy and a voyage planned by people who included contingencies and had access to more capable technology. In the summer of 1994, the…
Just before Christmas 2013, a diesel-powered, ice-capable Russian research vessel named MV Akademik Shokalskiy, which was carrying scientists studying climate change, got stuck in the Antarctic ice. The scientists on the ship were not in any immediate risk or suffering any hardship conditions; they had plenty of fuel and supplies. The scientists have been evacuated…
Bill Loveless from Platts Energy Week recently interviewed Mark Little, GE’s chief technology officer, about the company’s interests in the oil and gas extraction sector. Loveless and Little discussed GE’s planned investments into an Oklahoma-based research center that will be the first GE technology development laboratory that is focused on a single business sector. Mark…
On December 27, 2013, Matt Wald published a piece in the New York Times titled New Energy Struggles on Its Way to Markets that points to the predictable consequences of having too many energy options chasing too few customers. When there is excess supply compared to demand, prices tend to fall rather dramatically. Falling prices…
A friend just passed me a link to an article on Clean Technica by Zachary Shahan titled Why Are So Many Redditors Obsessed With Uncompetitive Nuclear Energy?. Shahan bemoans the fact that nuclear supporters on Reddit seem to outnumber solar and wind supporter and believes that contrasts with the real world as demonstrated by the…
On December 11, 2013, Henry Sokolski, the Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), hosted a event titled Avoiding Future Irans: A New Course for US Nonproliferation Policy. The papers offered as background material before the event started, the prepared remarks from Sokolski’s invited speakers, and the post meeting engagements I had with…
In 1993, after I had made a decision to resign my active duty commission and design a small atomic engine, a colleague warned me that “the oil companies will never let you succeed.” At the time, I was pretty naive, so I didn’t heed his warning. Over the years, I have gradually learned more about…
On November 14, 2013, a Chevron maintenance crew compromised a 10 inch pipe carrying liquified petroleum gas. The resulting explosion and hours long fire resulted in a precautionary evacuation of the nearby town that lasted about a day. No one was reported to have been injured during the event. The fire stopped burning once all…
On November 21, 2913, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman interviewed Kumi Naidoo, the Executive Director of Greenpeace, in a segment titled Greenpeace: In Opposing Oil Drilling, Detained “Arctic 30” Are Standing Up for Planet’s 7 Billion. (There is a full transcript of the interview at the link provided.) The above embedded video above includes the interview…
The best chance for humans to avert the worst risks of both accessible fossil fuel depletion and global climate change is for people who generally agree on those risks to begin working together to improve our ability to use nuclear energy. That will mean that both nuclear energy advocates and antinuclear environmentalists must recognize that…
Fissures related to nuclear energy are developing in the monolithic movement known as Environmentalism. The Breakthrough Institute has published a good introduction to the schism titled The Great Green Meltdown: How Economic Arguments Against Nuclear Highlight Environmentalist Delusions. Though this is a simplification, it is generally accurate to describe two sides of the movement that…